On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:28:16 +0100, you wrote:

>The optimistic view is that Microchip bought Hitech so they could provide a decent free compiler,
>and they will soon realise that  the way Hitech differentiatied free/paid-for products is likely to
>be actively damaging to them and change to a free code-limited (I'd be happy with 4K) version. 

But Microchip already differentiate their free and paid for C18, C30 and
C32 compilers by crippling optimisation. The early versions of C32 were
code size limited and they changed to optimisation crippling. 

Hi-Tech started to do what Microchip was already doing and now Microchip
bought Hi-Tech you think it will change? 

The question is how crippled the compiler is without optimisation and I
know Hi-Tech PICC Pro for the 10/12/16 is much worse than C30 and probably
C32 (I haven't used C18 enough to judge). 

So yes the free Hi-Tech versions could do with being less crippled but
perhaps the compiler architecture does not lend itself to just optimising a
bit.

Personally I hope Microchip reduce (eliminate)  the maintenance costs of
the Hi-Tech compilers, paying to get bugs fixed is the biggest turn off for
me. 


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